Church seemed to have a strong effect on Mas, more powerful than even a six-pack of foreign beer, as it knocked him out until noon the next day. Lloyd had told Mas to sleep in his and Mari’s bed, since both of them were going to stay at the hospital. Their bedroom was like a bear’s cave, dark and insulated. Mas cursed his son-in-law’s hospitality, and then Haruo’s failure to call him at daybreak. He finally got out the door at one, the time he usually called it quits from work.
Already in a bad mood, Mas felt even more irritated to see another delivery truck parked outside the neighbor’s house. The neighbor, the one who had reported the gunshot to the police, was pacing in the driveway, talking on his cell phone. When he saw Mas, he abruptly ended his call and walked down his driveway. “You’re that Japanese man, the one who’s helping with the garden, right?” he said to Mas.
Atarimae, of course I’m Japanese, Mas thought, making the mistake of making eye contact.
The man introduced himself as Howard Foster and gestured toward his open front door. “Come over here. I want to show you something.”
“I gotsu work.”
“It’ll only take a few minutes.”
Mas hesitated, but he remembered Elk Mamiya’s theory. That people were out to destroy them. Did this neighbor hate people different from him so much that he had killed Kazzy Ouchi? The only way to know was to get close, and entering the man’s house was one way to do it.
Mas didn’t think Howard would risk his grand lifestyle by killing Mas in broad daylight. So whether it was pure stupidity or a good hunch, Mas climbed up the brick stairs and followed Howard into his wood-framed home.
It was different from the Waxley House-more light, more openness. The hardwood floors were pristine, and all the furniture looked as if it had been created for the space. Chinese vases and plates were on display on cherrywood tables and chests.
Howard went into the dining room area and pointed to a long, narrow screen on the wall. “My prize possession.” It was a Japanese brush painting featuring a ball with bug eyes.
“ Daruma, ” Mas said.
“Yes, this is a Zenga painting from the Edo Era. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Mas usually saw daruma figures in Japanese gift stores in Little Tokyo. Made of papier-mâché, the daruma ’s round figure was all red, while his eyes were blank, missing. When Mari was a child, she asked him and Chizuko if he was a Japanese Santa Claus, but Chizuko explained that Daruma had been a Buddhist leader who looked at a blank wall for years and years. After a while, he lost use of his legs, thus turning into a ball. He also became blind, so when you bought a daruma figure, you were supposed to make a wish and color in one eye. Once the wish was granted, the other eye would be painted in.
“Nice.” Mas never thought much of art, even though he had a torn screen in his home. But his was the generic kind, with an image of a couple of sparrows resting on a bare tree branch. The screen that this Howard Foster had was the real deal.
Mas circled the core of the house. Unlike the Waxley House, which had a staircase in the middle, a staircase appeared on the side of the building, across from the fireplace. “You here all by yourself?”
“Yes,” Howard said, and then frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Mas replied, but he was actually wondering about the neighbor’s alibi. Sure, he had called in a report about hearing a gun going off at nine that night. But couldn’t he have shot Kazzy first and then called the police when he got back to his house?
Howard stood in front of his prized Buddhist painting. “So, looking at this, would you say that I was a Japan hater? That I’m a racist?”
Mas didn’t know what to say. It reminded him of one of his customers, who had decorated his house with moose heads and bear rugs. Did that mean he was an animal lover?
“Well, I’m not a racist,” Howard answered his own question. “Just a man who takes pride in his house. Can you imagine if they make the Waxley House into a museum? There’ll be visitors coming through there every day. I want peace and quiet, not crowds. That’s all that I was doing with that petition. Now I’m getting crank calls, angry letters. Being harassed by the police. Somebody even threw eggs at my house a couple of days ago. So tell your people to back off.”
What people? thought Mas. He had no people besides Mari, Lloyd, and Takeo. And they were too preoccupied to be thinking about throwing raw eggs at the neighbor’s house.
“Youzu talk to Becca. Thatsu best way,” Mas finally said.
“I can’t talk to her. She’s crazy. Unbalanced.”
Mas headed for the door, attempting to make his escape.
“Tell them to back off,” Howard repeated. “Stop telling lies, slandering me. I told the police that I’m going to file a grievance against the Ouchi Foundation, and I won’t stop there, if you know what I mean.”
Once Mas arrived at the Waxley House, he decided to forgo seeing Becca at the front door and went straight for the garden. He’d been up for only two hours, and he’d had enough of people already.
Like all gardens, Lloyd’s garden looked different in the early afternoon than in the morning. Mas preferred the early hours, when there was a hush over the trees and bushes, as if the insects hadn’t fully awakened yet. He checked the tape on the wounded cherry trees and was happy to see that the tight blossoms, mini baby fists, were ready to break open at the first sign of sun. He raked a few dead leaves and clipped off the unruly sides of a pine. He even began moving the rocks from the pile by the shed to their proper places around the pond. Walking to the far north side of the pond, Mas noticed that Lloyd had installed a tsukubai, a stone washbasin. The stone was the size of a bowling ball, the top and middle hollowed out to hold water. A piece of bamboo served as the water spout, but of course everything was still dry, because the pumping system had not been fully installed. This kind of tsukubai was used by followers of the tea ceremony. Mas was no expert on the tea ceremony, but had a former customer, a chado sensei, who had a special tatami room beside her kitchen for her classes every Tuesday. She made her students cleanse their hands in a makeshift tsukubai outside her screen door. Mas was told it was for purification purposes, but he just enjoyed seeing the women, even the old ones, in brightly colored, stiff kimono once a week.
Mas walked from the tsukubai to the bridge over the pond. The yellow police tape was still haphazardly draped over the gourd-shaped concrete floor. Mas squatted down to get a better look at the inscription Becca had been trying to show him that first day. Carved on the side, probably with the end of a stick while the concrete was still fresh, were the kanji characters, ko, and, short for ikiru. “Child lives”? Strange. What had Kazzy’s overeducated father been trying to say with this message? These artistic erai types had all kinds of sayings that made no sense to Mas.
Next was Sylvester the sycamore. Mas tentatively made his way to the toolshed. As he reached down for the handsaw, he couldn’t help but feel for the small indentation that had once held the bullet. Armed with the saw, Mas set up the ladder by the sycamore and went straight to work. The handsaw was old, probably from the seventies. Years of rain had seeped into the wooden handle, so Mas should have seen it coming. But he didn’t. With each push and pull of the saw, the wooden handle jiggled and the metal blade curved back and forth, instead of remaining straight. Seeing little result from his effort, Mas cursed under his breath and dragged the blade forward with all his might. The handle burst free, the blade sinking its rusty teeth into the soft tissue of his left hand, in between his index finger and thumb. A streak of blood immediately dripped down his hand. The wound burned so badly that Mas feared that he would do shikko in his pants. Mas was too stunned to even hear himself yell.
“Mr. Arai!” Becca poked her head from the upstairs window. “What have you done to yourself?”
Becca wrapped Mas’s hand in a dish towel and guided him up the staircase to the second floor of the Waxley House. Once they reached the top of the stairs, Mas could see that there were two rooms at opposite ends of the hallway, perfectly symmetrical like a set of weights on a barbell. Both doors were wide open. A TV set and fancy electronic equipment were stored in the room on the right, while an old-fashioned desk and typewriter sat in the left. They headed to the bathroom that was right smack in the middle.
“I’m so sorry,” said Becca. Mas sat on the closed lid of the toilet. “I should have told you not to bother with Sylvester without the proper tools.” Becca made Mas keep his hand elevated. She opened up the medicine chest and took out a plastic bottle of antiseptic and a tube of Neosporin. From the cabinet at the bottom of the sink came a roll of gauze bandage and some white tape.
“I think I’d better take you to the hospital. You might need some stitches. And definitely a shot for tetanus.”
Mas shook his head. He’d had enough of hospitals on both coasts. He had had his share of gardening war injuries over the decades; a sliced hand was as common to a gardener as a black eye to a boxer.
Becca must have realized that it was useless to argue with Mas. She soaked a cotton ball with the antiseptic and pressed hard against the cut, making sure that it hurt. While she was wrapping the gauze bandage, the phone rang. Becca went into the room with the TV equipment to take the call. She spoke about fruit platters, cheese, and other kinds of appetizers that Mas had never heard of. The bandage still dangling down his arm, Mas walked out of the bathroom, looked both ways, and headed for the unoccupied room-the one with the old-fashioned desk and typewriter. This had been Kazzy’s office, Mas figured. A row of bookshelves lined one of the walls. A small circular table sat in the middle, while a wooden desk, looking like it belonged in the TV Western Bonanza, was against the wall by the window. The desk had a roll top, which had some sort of lock, but it was a Cracker Jack kind that could be jiggled open with a nail file. Above the desk on the wall was a framed black-and-white photograph of a hakujin woman with a broad face and laughing eyes. Mas saw a slight resemblance to Becca. Must be the grandmother, Kazzy’s mother. On a small table was the ancient typewriter, labeled Remington. Mas remembered seeing that kind of typewriter at his janitor friend’s workplace, the Kashu Mainichi, once the number two newspaper in Little Tokyo. Now it was number zero, because it went belly-up in the early nineties. Housed in an old factory on First Street, the newspaper staff worked amid pigeons resting on a beam near a skylight, while one of the staff members’ cats prowled on the cement floor.
For old times’ sake, Mas pressed down on one of the typewriter keys. Had to have strong fingers to type on these old machines, that’s for sure. Not like those fancy computer keyboards they had now.
He heard the front door open and shut. He walked away from the typewriter, knowing he shouldn’t have been in the room. He kept his hand elevated and waited for Becca to complete her phone call.
“Hello?” It wasn’t Becca but the old lady, Miss Waxley. Miss Waxley was probably a little younger than Mas, but she seemed from another era. She smelled like the fragrance counter of a department store. She probably used a handkerchief to blow her nose and went to the hairdresser’s once a week.
“Mr. Arai,” she said, and Mas was surprised that the hakujin woman had remembered his name. “Where’s Becca?”
“Telephone,” he said, gesturing with his bandaged hand toward the other room.
“What happened?” She put her fancy pocketbook down on the circular table and took a closer look at Mas’s wound.
Mas didn’t want to get into the story, but allowed Miss Waxley to grab a pair of scissors from the desk and snip the loose gauze bandage. “Sank you,” he managed to say.
They stared at each other for a good minute before Miss Waxley tried to make conversation. “Do you know that this was my parents’ room?” Miss Waxley said.
“Oh, yah?”
“In fact, the typewriter and desk were originally theirs.”
Tsumaranai. Boring as hell to hear an old lady talk. But she had extended her friendship by helping Mas with his hand, so he at least owed her some listening time.
“My mother was housebound for years with her illness. She could putter around the house a little; even make some meals, I was told. I don’t have any memories of this house, because we had moved to Manhattan, closer to my father’s office, by the time I was one. It was a new start for our family, I guess.
“Now it’s just me,” Miss Waxley said with a weak smile.
Since everyone called the old lady “miss,” she had probably never married, figured Mas. Even though she had money, she must be lonely, all by herself. Good thing she is involved in the garden project, he thought.
Becca then walked in, freeing Mas from Miss Waxley’s stories. The conversation turned to food, so Mas excused himself, saying that he would be leaving after he put the remaining bandage roll back in the bathroom.
After closing the door of the medicine chest, Mas heard a couple of male voices through the open bathroom window. Underneath the diseased sycamore tree were Phillip and a young man, a teenager, wearing a blue knit beanie cap trimmed in gold.
“This is the last time. I’m telling you,” Phillip said. Mas couldn’t see his face, just the top of his thinning hair. He opened his wallet and stuffed some bills in the boy’s hand. “If you say anything, it’s not only my head, it’s yours, too, remember?”
The boy said nothing. After getting his money, he walked away from the house, toward Flatbush Avenue.
As Mas quickly made his way down the stairs, he heard the jangling of a key at the front door. Slipping out the back, Mas hurried to the sidewalk in search of the teenager in the beanie cap.
There was no sign of him on Flatbush. He couldn’t have walked that quickly, unless he had taken a taxi, Mas thought. Or the underground train, a block away. Mas headed for the hole of the train station, marked this time by the letter Q in a yellow circle. He had no idea what direction the boy would travel, so he did what any betting man did in cases like this-he took a wild guess. Train going to Manhattan.
The train had already arrived, and the doors were open. Entering the train, Mas scanned the crowd for the blue beanie cap. There was no time for hesitation. Before the doors screeched closed, Mas dashed in like a cockroach seeking shelter. This time there were plenty of empty seats. Jerking left and right, Mas walked the whole length of one car. No luck. Looking through the window in the door of the adjoining car, Mas learned that he had scored a home run. In the far corner sat the teenager, his eyes closed, oblivious that he was being watched.
After entering the teenager’s car, Mas made himself comfortable in an empty seat down the same row. Phillip was obviously paying the boy off to keep a secret. But what kind of secret was Phillip keeping? Had he paid off the boy to kill his father? Mas shuddered. He hated to think that a son would go to such lengths to calculate his father’s murder.
Hadn’t that newspaper article said that Phillip was the number two man at Kazzy’s company? Mas knew many customers who had their sons working for them. More often than not, some kind of problem would come up, and eventually the son was not welcome at the parents’ house anymore.
Mas looked down the row of passengers to the boy in the beanie cap again. He could pass for hakujin, but Mas wouldn’t be surprised if the boy was part Asian, Latino, or even Jewish or Arabian. He had a strong nose, dark skin, and a healthy crop of black beard stubble, along with a pair of pork-chop sideburns. Mas could tell he was not baka; the kid had some smarts, based on the way he sat with his back straight, not hunched over, and his shoes flat on the ground.
Stop after stop, Mas waited for the boy to rouse out of his sleep. But even when the train emerged from below ground, the boy did not stir. They traveled over a bridge, its metal girders casting shadows over the windows of the train. Below was the gray slate of the river, which both comforted and saddened Mas. Some would say water was water, but Mas could feel the difference between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Pacific had a greenish tinge, containing the promise of fish strong enough to withstand the power of sewage and other man-made pollution. The Atlantic, on the other hand, seemed to be covered with a cold, concretelike layer. Mas knew that there must be some kind of life underneath, but it was well hidden from those above sea level.
The train churned ahead to an island full of skyscrapers, a small pot full of overgrown plants. Mas glanced at his Casio watch. Already four o’clock. It would be dark soon. He regretted that he had left his Dodgers cap on the couch back at the apartment.
After a muffled message over the intercom-Mas couldn’t make out the street but heard “ Times Square ”-the boy finally rose. He pulled at his knit cap, as if he wanted more protection for the backs of his earlobes. As the boy scanned the rest of the people in the train car, Mas quickly lowered his eyes. No flicker of recognition. Mas, fortunately, was passed over again.
With the opening of the doors, out went the boy, Mas right behind. Tug had described this island of Manhattan as a river of people, and he wasn’t just making up stories. Even starting in the train station, the crowd pushed and pulled Mas forward, as if he didn’t need to take any steps of his own.
His hand still smarted, but shikata ga nai. There was nothing he could do about it, so there was no sense in crying about the pain.
As they were released outdoors, it was more of the same. A wall of cars and yellow taxicabs and then the moving force of the crowd. Mas followed the boy so closely that he almost stepped on the heels of his shoes. Normally Mas would have attracted attention, but here he was just like any other ant trying to make it up the anthill.
They walked west, below enormous neon signs and billboards; Mas felt as if he had stepped into an overbloated Disneyland that had gotten sick and thrown up on itself. But after a few blocks, there were no neon signs or tourists with video cameras. The buildings were all red brick of different sizes. Some spanned blocks-most likely they had housed some kind of factory at one time. Others were long and narrow, with the familiar crisscross of fire escapes.
Even the smells became more pungent. They were a mix of smoke, grime, shikko, and peppery spices. The boy turned off into an alley in between two factory buildings, and Mas hesitated. Alleys in any city were dangerous places. Perfect locations for broken bottles and broken bodies. As far as Mas could tell from peeking from the corner, there were no bodies here. Just a few vegetable crates and a rubber trash can.
The boy knocked on a faded red door and was let inside. Mas thought about what he wanted to do next. A pigeon flew from one fire escape to another on a building facing the other side of the alley. Mas approached the building and put his ear to the red door. He heard the healthy pitch of young male voices. So the boy was now among his peers. What was Mas going to do next?
Mas felt like an aho again. Wasting time wandering around Manhattan when there was plenty to do at the garden. Then he noticed light coming from a lone window about ten feet from the ground. Couldn’t hurt just to take a look.
Mas balanced one of the crates on the rubber trash can. Holding on to a pipe alongside the wall with his good hand, he lifted himself onto the trash can and then one more step up on the crate, blackened by mildew and other decay from the water and snow. The wood slats were starting to come loose from the frame; Mas knew that he would only be able to stay on his unstable perch for a few minutes.
Still hanging on to the pipe, Mas lifted his body so that his eyes were at least an inch above the window frame. There were five good-for-nothing boys drinking beer, some of them guzzling the foreign kind that Lloyd liked. They sat sunken in couches and stuffed chairs around a low table. On the table, besides the dozens of open beer bottles, were packages of pills. On one corner were stacks of money.
Throughout the years, Mas had seen his share of changes. Computers. Telephones that could float around without a cord. Cars that ran on electricity. But some things never changed, in particular a man’s lust for drugs and sex. Back in Hiroshima right after the war, it had been hiropon. Heroin. Mas had watched one orphaned buddy after another fall to its temptation. If it wasn’t hiropon, then it was alcohol that was actually meant for cars. Teenage drunkards-all chinpira, would-be gangsters-burned their insides drinking that stuff, but apparently in a strange way it also eased the pain in their heads.
Mas didn’t know what chinpira of today had to be sorry for, but he had seen enough. The crate underneath him was ready to crack open, so he lowered himself onto the lid of the garbage can. As he jumped to the ground, he heard a slight sound, the crunch of gravel. An arm went around his neck and tightened against his throat.
Mas struggled to breathe. Feeling a surge of adrenaline, he instinctively bent forward and let his attacker flip over his back as easily as a sack of rice. Luckily it wasn’t the pill-popping teenager in the beanie. Mas would have had no chance against that power. Instead, it was Phillip Ouchi, a weed of a man.
Phillip remained on the soiled concrete, shocked and maybe even dismayed that he had been overturned by a seventy-year-old man. Mas knew that he might try something again, so he grabbed a loose wooden slat and waved it, nail side down, in front of Phillip’s face.
“What do you hope to achieve, Mr. Arai?” Phillip asked, breathless, but with the same nasty attitude he’d shown at the Waxley House.
Mas tightened his grip around the slat with his right hand, while his bandaged left hand pulsed with pain-probably all the extra blood and excitement churning through his body.
“Hey! Hey!” Phillip suddenly called out.
Now, what was the sonafugun trying to prove? Mas then heard the squeak of a hinge and the opening of the door behind him.
The five chinpira, including the one with the beanie cap, circled Mas and Phillip. The beanie cap boy had a gun in his hand, and the tallest guy of the bunch had brought out some long and skinny object-perhaps a lead pipe to beat Mas?
“What’s going on here, Mr. O.?” the beanie cap boy, obviously the ringleader, asked Phillip, who was now struggling onto his feet.
“This man followed you from the Waxley House. I trailed him the whole way here.”
“So what happened, you tripped?”
Phillip said nothing and looked down the length of the alley.
“Dang, I think the old man knocked him down,” one of the teenagers spit out, and then all of them began laughing.
“He looks about a hundred years old.”
“Seventy,” murmured Mas.
“Excuse me?” The beanie cap boy raised his gun to Mas’s chin. The nozzle felt cold and smelled smoky, as if it had been fired recently.
“Izu seventy.” Mas felt his knees shake, but he still managed to stay standing.
“You hear that-he’s seventy,” the ringleader announced to his friends. He then looked at Phillip. “So, Mr. O., you got punked by a seventy-year-old.”
All the young men began laughing.
Phillip brushed the seat of his pants as though the condition of his clothes were more important to him than the teenagers’ jeers.
The ringleader turned his attention back to Mas. He had lowered the gun, and Mas managed to swallow. “So why were you following me?” the teenager asked.
“I see youzu get money. Tryin’ to figure out why.”
“He’ll probably go straight to the police, Riley,” Phillip said. So Riley, that was the kid’s name.
Mas shook his head. “Die on drugs, I no care.”
“Then what do you care about, old man?”
“Kazzy Ouchi. How he die.”
Riley’s face turned instantly darker, like clouds before a summer shower. “Had nothing to do with that. I told you,” he said to Phillip.
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Phillip said. “His daughter and son-in-law are suspects, so he’s just trying to point the finger at anyone he can.”
Riley took hold of Mas’s right wrist. The wooden slat clattered to the ground. The teenager had taken note of Mas’s injury, because he gestured for one of his other chinpira to grab Mas’s bandaged left hand. This one knew what he was doing, because he pressed into the very softness of the wound. Water sprang to Mas’s eyes, but he kept from dripping tears down his face. He wouldn’t give any of these sonafuguns the satisfaction of seeing him cry.
“I don’t want to hurt you, grandpa. Just forget you’ve seen anything, and you’ll have no problems,” Riley said.
Mas knew that the ringleader was talking about the drugs, so he nodded.
“And drop the whole thing with the dead man in the pond. It was suicide, you got it? The old guy shot his own brains out.”
Mas nodded again, but he had no intention of going along with the boy’s demands on that one. They released his hands, and Mas noticed that the bandage around his left palm was now bright red from a flow of fresh blood.
“And you,” Riley said to Phillip, “get the hell out of here. I’ll need an extra grand now with this complication.”
Phillip looked like he was going to protest, but he must have realized that he was physically overmatched. He stumbled down the alley, a stain visible on the back of his pants.
One by one, the young men returned to the room behind the red door, the last one being the tall teenager with his long and skinny weapon. With the light above the door, Mas could finally see that it was not a lead pipe but actually a shiny new top-of-the-line Weedwacker.
Mas barely made it back to the underground apartment. His left hand had finally stopped bleeding, but both hands were still trembling. Those sonafuguns had stolen the equipment from the garden, Mas was convinced. The beanie cap boy had claimed that he had nothing to do with Kazzy’s death, but he was a damn usotsuki, a liar of the worst kind.
He dropped his dentures into one of Mari and Lloyd’s drinking glasses and gritted his gums together. This was too much for him, he finally had to admit. He collapsed onto the couch, hoping for even nightmares to take over his reality.